Trump Responds: I Will Drain The Swamp

President-elect Donald Trump has asserted that he will uphold his promise to "drain the swamp." Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had previously implied that Trump was no longer interested following through with the campaign slogan.

On Dec. 22, Trump took to his Twitter account to rebuff Gingrich, who had recently suggested that the business mogul would no longer be using the phrase "drain the swamp," CNN reports.

"Someone incorrectly stated that the phrase 'DRAIN THE SWAMP' was no longer being used by me," Trump tweeted out. "Actually, we will always be DTS."

Trump's tweet arrived a day after Gingrich suggested that the president-elect was no longer interested in following through on the campaign promise to clear out lobbyists and big money interests in Washington, D.C.

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"I'm told he now just disclaims that," Gingrich told NPR. "He now says it was cute, but he doesn't want to use it anymore."

The former House Speaker added that he believed Trump used the slogan as a campaign device to drum up excitement, similarly to how he had threatened to imprison his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"I've noticed on a couple of fronts, like people chanting 'lock her up,' that he's in a different role now and maybe he feels that as president, as the next president of the United States, that he should be marginally more dignified than talking about alligators in swamps," Gingrich said.

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The former House Speaker, who had been a vocal Trump campaign surrogate, concluded that the president-elect "is my leader and if he decides to drop the swamp and the alligator, I will drop the swamp and the alligator."

Shortly after Trump's tweet, Gingrich appeared to reverse course, taking to social media to assert that he had misspoken.

"I goofed," Gingrich tweeted out. "Draining the swamp is in, [Trump] is going to do it, and the alligators should be worried."

That same morning, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski predicted that rooting out the lobbyist culture in Capitol Hill would take a backseat to improving the economy and repealing the Affordable Care Act in the incoming administration.

"If you put them in a chronological order, 'drain the swamp' is probably somewhere down at the bottom," Lewandowski told Fox News' "Fox & Friends."